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Overcoming Performance Anxiety

"To make sexual concerns and performance anxiety secretive, or to internalize and repress them, only makes the issues worse."

One of the greatest sexual and emotional obstacles for men today is performance anxiety. Those who battle it on a regular basis know how crippling and debilitating worrying about it can be. The problem is in the term itself: "performance anxiety."

We have socialized ourselves to think of sex as an act, a performance, with an expected role we are supposed to conform to. Maybe our anxiety around sex comes from the expectations imposed on masculinity in our culture, from watching porn, from our depictions of how men act in the media, from fears or insecurities that fuel this need to perform. It could be because of our desire for partner or peer validation that we think we need to excel in something that every man is supposed to be a stud at doing.